4 days ago
How LA's business-labor ballot faceoff ends
WHAT'S THE DEAL? — Business leaders and powerful service unions are at each other's throats in Los Angeles in a retaliatory tit-for-tat that began with passage of a new $30 minimum wage for tourism workers and has now launched six separate measures toward the 2026 ballot.
What each side hopes to accomplish in the spiraling conflict is an open question, as Emily explored in a story this weekend, leaving some in the Southland to wonder whether they're seeing a well-worn playbook for shaping policy in the Capitol now being deployed in city halls.
Ever since state law changed a decade ago to allow proponents to quash their measures once qualified, there's been a pattern of 'labor and business filing competing ballot initiatives and using it as a negotiation tactic,' said Los Angeles political consultant Michael Trujillo. 'What you're seeing is just a very long-held strategy of using ballot initiatives making its way to LA.'
Mayor Karen Bass has begun meeting with business-side groups to discuss a potential deescalation. The groups filed a referendum in late May to overturn the minimum-wage law and a subsequent proposal in July to repeal the city's $750-million-per-year gross-receipts tax.
'I think we're always amenable to sit down and figure out what the compromise is,' said Greg Plummer, who owns a 250-employee concession company at Los Angeles International Airport. 'But we don't want a Band-Aid solution.'
At the other side of a negotiating table would be Unite Here Local 11, which lobbied for the so-called 'Olympic Wage' and responded to the citizens-veto referendum by targeting its backers' bottom lines. The four countermeasures otherwise have little in common; one penalizes companies for their CEO pay, another makes it harder to build sports arenas and concert halls.
The powerful service union has already used the California ballot-measure leverage playbook in Los Angeles. In 2022, the powerful service union qualified an initiative for the 2024 ballot that would have forced local hotels to rent vacant rooms to homeless people. But labor leaders agreed to drop the measure about a year later when the City Council passed tighter regulations on the development of new hotels.
Conversations with people involved in the business-side measures indicate a handful of potential points for negotiation. They'd want to see Unite Here withdraw its initiatives from the ballot, for one. But they would also likely want the City Council to agree to slow implementation of the new $30 wage law, giving businesses more time to comply — much like councilors did in 2015, when then-Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a $15 minimum wage bill into law.
'Not one business leader has said, 'Don't do the $30 minimum wage.' We have said, 'Do it in the right way,'' said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, which represents business interests in the San Fernando Valley. 'A 55-percent increase over the course of three years is just not sustainable. No business can do that.'
Negotiations, of course, require both parties involved to come to the proverbial table — and leaders of Unite Here seem less inclined to do so than their industry counterparts. Union co-president Kurt Petersen told Playbook last week that he sees the airline and tourism companies' decision to launch the referendum as a sign they weren't operating in good faith.
'I don't know what's left to negotiate,' he told Playbook. 'They had their chance, they decided to betray those negotiations, and our members are looking forward to getting a lot more done at the ballot next year.'
NEWS BREAK: UC Board of Regents meet this afternoon in emergency closed-door meeting on how to respond to the Trump administration's $1 billion fine … Gifford Fire in San Luis Obispo County grows to 117,000 acres ... President Donald Trump defends his decision to sell chipmaker Nvidia an export control license.
Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM focused on California's lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@ and wmccarthy@ or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
TOP OF THE TICKET
A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures — past and future, certain and possible — getting our attention this week.
1. Redistricting (2025?): Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing ahead with his plan to put mid-decade redistricting before California voters in a November special election, writing in a letter to Trump this morning that, 'If you will not stand down, I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California.' All eyes will be on Democrats' proposed maps, which are slated for release ahead of the Legislature's return next week.
2. Bay Area transit (2026?): Both the San Mateo and Santa Clara county transit agencies voted late last week to join the mega-regional ballot measure to fund BART and other public transportation in the Bay Area. The development is a major victory for the tax proposal, which will now come before voters in five counties.
3. Affordable housing bond (2026?): The $10 billion bond to fund affordable housing appears — along with other ballot-related legislation like SB 42, which would allow public financing of elections — to have stalled behind redistricting in the Capitol's queue, for at least the first portion of the Legislature's return. The bond has passed the Assembly but has thus far made little progress in the Senate.
4. Voter ID (2026): Assemblymember Carl DeMaio's grassroots organization says it has recruited 10,000 volunteers to collect signatures for an initiative that would require government-issued identification to vote. Reform California says it will launch a bus tour and rallies across the state beginning Oct. 12.
5. Minimum wage (Los Angeles, 2026?): It will take another month to determine the future of an airline- and hotel-backed referendum that kicked off the LA ballot war. The city clerk is now conducting a hand count of 140,000 signatures submitted in late June by the LA Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress after a random sample fell short of the validity rate required to qualify outright.
6. Calexit (2028?): Among those who enjoyed Will's POLITICO Magazine profile of Calexit's CEO Xavier Mitchell, which exposed his criminal history and pattern of deceit, is apparently Yes California, the group that founded the state's modern sovereignty movement. Over the past week, the group has posted increasingly weird AI-generated videos about the Mitchell controversy, writing in one post on X that 'the people behind CalExit these days are idiots.'
7. Measure CL (Culver City, 2025): The Culver City Chamber of Commerce has endorsed the half-cent sales tax increase on an all-mail Aug. 26 special election ballot. The organization may boast the most prestigious membership of any small city's chamber: It includes Apple, Amazon Studios, and Sony Pictures.
SCHEDULING WINDOW
TIME'S UP FOR NOVEMBER BALLOT: While the Legislature has until Aug. 22 to pass a redistricting package in time to come before voters on Nov. 4, other governments around California won't have the same flexibility to rush their priorities onto a newly scheduled special-election ballot. Local measures must be approved at least 88 days before an election — meaning last Friday was the last possible day to do so.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ...
RIDESHARE DRIVERS (2020): After spending $204 million to classify their drivers as private contractors via Prop 22, Uber and Lyft are now putting pressure on senators to defeat a bill heading to the appropriations committee that would allow gig workers to unionize.
The group, now calling itself the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services coalition, has argued that AB 1340 violates the intent of voters that gave Prop 22 its majority. The bill introduced by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Marc Berman would give drivers collective-bargaining rights, a possibility originally limited by the ballot initiative but later reopened after a state appeals-court decision.
The coalition has argued that the bill would make rideshare services 'less affordable and less accessible for the millions of Californians' and require companies to share drivers' personal information. Those arguments have failed to slow the bill, which has cruised through transportation committees in both houses.
ON OTHER BALLOTS
Tenants' rights groups in Massachusetts filed an initiative last week that would tie annual rent increases to cost-of-living growth, overturning a 1994 ballot referendum banning rent control in the state ... An Oregon initiative to privatize liquor sales, a measure identical to a failed 2022 proposal but from different proponents this time, received its ballot title from the state's justice department ...
Local Republican leaders in Idaho are launching an initiative effort to repeal the state's 6-percent tax on food items after a legislative push on the issue failed ... Seattle voters will weigh in this November on an initiative that would tax businesses' gross receipts versus revenues, a move the City Council made after seeing Seattle's economic forecast improve slightly ...
And an initiative to ban private fireworks in Switzerland is gaining some new momentum after a new poll — released just ahead of the country's firework-filled national holiday — found 68 percent of Swiss voters support it.
POSTCARD FROM ...
… SANTA ROSA: A century-old North Bay commuter school wants to ask the voters of the Sonoma County Junior College District for a near-billion-dollar bond to update aging infrastructure, including a Great Depression-era building that houses its art department. But while affordability concerns push down polling numbers elsewhere for new taxes and borrowing, Santa Rosa Junior College is counting on its deep connections even beyond its county lines to ease its way to passage in 2026.
'We are huge in our community,' said Kate Jolley, the school's vice president of finance and administrative services. 'It's not the same throughout the state, we really have something special here.'
In the 106 years since its founding as a feeder school for UC Berkeley, Santa Rosa Junior College has established itself as one of the best community colleges in the state. WalletHub last year ranked it 16th out of 653 on its list of the country's 'Best & Worst Community Colleges.'
But all those years of service have also taken a toll on campus facilities, including an unrenovated, approximately 85-year-old 'heritage' building constructed by the federal Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The community-college district that encompasses all of Sonoma County as well as parts of Marin and Mendocino has approved two bonds for facilities maintenance and renovations since 2002, but that money for infrastructure is now drying up.
Support for such funding measures was once nearly automatic, especially in progressive areas like this. But in May a local group called the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers was able to defeat a 52-cent per-square foot parcel tax in a small Marin school district that previously had been undefeated when asking its community for more money.
Instead of asking voters to approve a new tax, Santa Rosa Junior College is now exploring whether an extension of the existing bond would sit better with a penny-pinching electorate. The college has commissioned Bay Area pollster FM3 to study voter attitudes as it decides how to fund its way into another century.
'We are hoping that the relationship we have in our community will help move us forward,' Jolley said. 'And if not, we will hear that.'
LETTER OF THE DAY
… MEASURE G: In 2024, Measure G was a Los Angeles County charter amendment that created a task force now working to transform the structure of local government. In the past, the letter G has been used to identify a range of local-level ballot measures across the state, including those to:
Grant San Francisco city employees two weeks of vacation after one year's service, and three weeks after five years (1948, failed) ... Set rates for a service that would allow Richmond residents to watch television over cables from 'one master antenna' (1968, failed) … Extend rent-control protections for Berkeley tenants in three- and four-unit properties (1982, passed) … Convert a 72-acre oceanfront bluff in Half Moon Bay into a 'passive park' (1989, passed) … Impose term limits for Fresno's mayor (1996, passed)… Allow Mendocino County residents to grow up to 25 marijuana plants for personal use (2000, passed) … Enact a 2-percent utility users tax in Morgan Hill (2008, failed) ... Require voter approval for any land designation changes in Goleta for agricultural parcels more than 10 acres (2012, passed) ... Change the city of Escondido from a general law city to a charter city (2014, failed) ... Protect 'scenic corridors' and 'vista points' along Highway 50 through El Dorado County's zoning plan (2016, failed) ... Increase the Calaveras County hotel tax to fund general services (2018, passed) ... Limit City Council salary increases in Carlsbad (2020, passed) ... And approve a business tax for commercial cannabis companies in Corona (2022, passed).
